If Zappa had been a stern and humorless musician, he likely wouldn’t have had such a lasting impact on such a wide audience. His wife Gail Zappa (who passed away in 2015) was the first to recognize that it wasn’t easy to like his entire body of work: “Most often, you like this album or that album, or a specific era. But I met several fans who told me they loved absolutely everything that he did. It was hard for me to believe. It’s not easy, but if you do things in the right order, you can do it. There are a few freaks that are able to listen to everything, even the most experimental or avant-garde stuff that he created. I know it, I am one of them.”
An astute observer of the world around him filled with huge curiosity, Zappa is one of the rare artists to have never known a lack of inspiration. You would struggle to find someone more prolific, his many official productions are only the tip of a colossal iceberg. “He didn’t take himself seriously at all and knew how to take a step back,” said Gail, “and he didn’t really value objects, even CDs. He only cared about the way they were made and what they contained. If he kept everything that he had created, even the smallest things, it was because he had a long-term plan. As a composer, he knew that everything could prove useful at one time or another. Not forgetting that, as was the case for everyone, it's what pays the bills.”
Zappa will also go down in history for his artistic freedom. “No one ever asked him to release albums,” continued Gail,”he was always the one deciding to do it. He didn’t wait to see how the public would react to an album before moving onto the next one. More than anything else he loved to sit down from time to time and compose with just his guitar. We never know when an idea will start to take shape. The best thing to do is to record everything, so then, you have mountains of tapes you can browse through again. You wouldn’t believe all the gems that are yet to be discovered.”
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